Update of Humanities Sites

The department of philosophy's site has been ported into php versions of the templates provided by the University. We've also updated the php and javascript code that controls the display of course offerings making that display more useful and user-friendly.

Launched the website for the new Social Justice Studies website at http://web.uvic.ca/socialjustice

The new French website is now online at http://web.uvic.ca/french

The new Humanities site launched today. http://web.uvic.ca/humanities

The site addresses the following priorities:
- primary organization by intended audience
- restrict access to chairs and secretaries for certain content
- ease content maintenance by dept secretary

We created the site within the following technical constraints:
- site based on the university's templates
- content editable in Contribute by dept secretary
- navigation, banner, footer centralized; rendered by php includes, editable in text editor by dept secretary or HCMC as appropriate

Clifton obtained the final OK from James Young and Liz Wick to upload the new version of the Philosophy department site to their account. Most of the changes in the site are to simplify routine maintenance - in particular a system for allowing Liz to use a web-based editor to edit text on the pages. http://web.uvic.ca/philosophy

The English dept is rewriting is hiring contractors to rewrite its dept site over the summer and wants the HCMC to be able to maintain the site if needbe.

English intends to include the ability to scrape the Calendar site for course listings and allow browser-based editing of limited bits of text in the site. These features we also have and hope to have (respectively) in the new phil site, so we'll be able to compare the two implementations and learn from that.

The HCMC is willing to take on the role of maintaining the site on three conditions:

1) The HCMC needs to have approval on the specifications for any parts of the site that we will be expected to maintain. In particular, we need to know what technology is intended to implement the "spider" and "browser-editing" abilities.

2) The developers must provide full technical documentation on their work. I can provide more details on the kind of documentation (both in the code and as separate files) that we'd expect - it's nothing beyond industry standards, but the long-term well-being of the site will depend on it.

3) The site be hosted on uvic's main web hosting computer. If the site is housed outside of the university, then the HCMC will have to review whether it can commit to maintenance as the costs to the HCMC of working with non-UVic sys-admins are considerably higher than working with UVic sys-admins.

Clifton Dildy and I will be rewriting the philosophy department site over the next eight weeks or so.

OBJECTIVES:
1 allow information on each section of each course to be included
2 facilitate inclusion of course handouts and material for all courses offered
3 maintain current informational structure and GUI as far as feasible
4 simplify maintenance of site: some aspects by HCMC, some by PHIL
5 test use of AJAX and PHP to allow Phil dept to edit content in certain elements
6 simplify maintenance of lists of courses offered by dept in current summer and winter term, and lists of courses offered by each instructor

INITIATION:
Dean Rippin's request

OBJECTIVES:
Goal is to update the website for the Faculty of Humanities to ease maintenance and to optimize the content and structure for each of three specific audiences

PARTICIPANTS:
Andrew Rippin to set objectives and review prototypes, Jennifer Lefler to review for maintainability as she'll be maintaining the content of the site.
Robin Sutherland of web coordinator's office providing templates for UVic standard site.
Stewart will take those templates and create site within them to meet objectives. Will also use project to become familiar with the templates and with the Contribute editor, specifically testing Contribute's abilities with php. Content similar to current, but updated where necessary and centralized where possible.

COMMITMENT:
Andrew Rippin and Jennifer Lefler already maintaining current site (using Contribute) and intend to continue to do so as much as possible.
Jennifer and Andrew willing to apply their current knoweldge of content editing to this new site and to learn enough to do that.

TECHNOLOGY:
Based on UVic standard template, though may be modified to support php includes.
Site will be hosted on unix.uvic.ca

FUNDING AND RESOURCES:
HCMC time and resources out of normal operating budget.

MILESTONES AND END OF THE PROJECT:
Analysis of content and proposed new structure: end of Dec 06
Research into Contribute and how best to use it for this site: end of Dec 06
Prototype approved: end of January 07
Completion of site: end of February 07
Training on maintenance of content: March 07
Likely target date for end of project: March 2007

CRITERIA FOR CESSATION OF PROJECT:
In the unlikely event that the web coordinator announces new templates during the course of this project, this project will be suspended to determine which templates to use.

FIT WITH EXISTING WORK:
Will allow Stewart to become refamiliarized with templates and in better position to comment on needed changes for new templates
Will allow Stewart to become familiar with capabilities and limits of Contribute, and with writing pages (in whatever editor) that are amenable to content editing in Contribute

Derived from work documented in the Depts blog.